Wednesday, September 07, 2022

Radio Show Prep in the 80's and 90's

 

While cleaning out an old briefcase (remember those?) I came across these pages of my KUDL-FM (Kansas City) show prep from 1994. I’m not sure whether to just throw this out or submit it to a broadcasting museum.




In the mid to late 80’s I would research my show prep by heading to the local public library to use their computerized card catalog to show synopsis of various entertainment magazine articles which featured artists my station played. I would then have to write the information down, take to my father-in-law’s house since he had a Compaq IBM PC compatible “luggable” with Lotus 1-2-3 where I could add to my show prep spreadsheet stored on a 5.25” floppy and print on tractor fed paper with a dot matrix printer, the result you see above.

In the early 90’s I had a PC clone with a 2400 baud dial up modem. This allowed me to access the library’s BBS to perform the same searches, but with the advantage of being able to cut and paste the text into my spreadsheet. Even better, the radio station at which I was working had CompuServe. I would get to the station a bit early to sign in and search for more articles on the artists and songs we were playing and add to the spreadsheet.

 

The first studio with a computer with internet access that I remember was in 2000, and that was always plagued with a virus of some sort. 

 

The things we take for granted, right?

 

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